Curtis Carpenter Speaks on How to Use Social Media as a Business Growth Tool

Steve Schwartz 0:00
Hey, how's the food everybody?

Thumbs up, because that's a mouthful.

Alright, we're gonna go ahead and get started with the next part of our presentation here today.

All right, great. I'd like to introduce Curtis carpenter. Curtis has been involved in digital marketing for the past six years after being a partner in a local digital marketing firm for five years. He went out on his own and founded Vero Beach social media in August of 2021. Prior to working in digital marketing, he spent 13 years working in the field of Radiology, with the last five years spent helping local political candidates run for office, and the latter is where he found his interest and passion in marketing, essentially figuring out how to reach more people with specific interests for less money. That passion turned into over a million dollars spent on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and YouTube advertisements on behalf of hundreds of clients, ranging from Vero Beach to San Francisco to Costa Rica. He loves producing podcasts and weekly vlogs. Today, he's speaking on the topic, how to use social media as a business growth tool. Everyone please help me welcome Curtis carpenter.

Curtis Carpenter 1:25
All right, good afternoon, everybody. How are you?

Good. I made a PowerPoint presentation. And when I made it, I said, Man, this isn't isn't very visual, unfortunately to these guys. And turns out the joke's on me. I'm the only one looking at it. So.

Anyhow, thank you, Steve. Thank you, Maureen, for inviting me. Thank you southern social for having us here.

So how to use social media as a business growth tool. I'll give you a little background on me, I guess a little bit more possibly than what Steve gave us. I didn't grow up in Vero Beach. We moved here when I was nine years old. I was Vero Beach Elementary School, graduating from high school. And I never left I went to any River Community College at the time, got a degree in radiology. And I pretty much did everything you could do in that field. And the 13 years that I worked in it, I did CAT scans, MRIs, interventional radiology, procedure, bridge and kidney stones called lithotripsy. I got really bored with it.

And while I was doing that, I was helping local political candidates run for office in town, whether it was city council, county commission, school board, things like that. And what you learn about local political candidates is that their budget is not very large. So you have to make every dollar go as far as possible. So we're buying ads through Tec comm reaching out to six, three trends in space, coast radio, are all wonderful organizations and wonderful places to advertise. But very expensive. And so what I was trying to do was figure out the cheapest way that I could get ads in front of the typical vote. And what we learned was social media was the cheapest way and most effective way to do that. So see through the deck.

So why social media. So there's four bullet points that I kind of want to touch on. Number one, everybody's on social media. And when I say everybody, it's a generalization, but for the most part, everybody's on social media, you have the ability to interact with current and potential customers. So what I mean by that is, most traditional advertising is one way, I send a radio ad and I'm hoping the person hears it, but I can't have that conversation. I send a mailer. I hope somebody gets it reads it, but I'm not getting it back. somebody sees my television commercial, they see it, I'm not having a conversation with them. It's all one way. Media gives you that ability to multiple with your customer.

You can use multiple types of contents. What I mean by that is use a blog, you can use photo, you can use video, you can use audio, most traditional advertising places. You're pigeonholed into one piece of content. And then there are tremendous advertising capabilities. And I'll get into that a little bit more as we get through this. So when I say it's where everyone is, again, it's not literally everyone, but there are 2.9 billion monthly active users on Facebook, 1.2 billion monthly active users on Instagram, and there are a billion hours of content watched on YouTube do

a billion with these now, with these billions. I would like to pose a question. Can anybody guess what the most visited website in 2021? Was

Google closed but not correct. YouTube? Close but not correct. Tick tock tick tock.

Tick tock was the most visited website in 2021. I figured See, I would have been upset if you didn't get that I waited for other Yeah, that was very polite. But yeah, I figured Steve would know that. Yeah, tick tock. So most people think Google that's a great comment. That was my guess. And then when I heard it wasn't Google, I thought YouTube. I wanted them I guess. It is amazing to me that Tik Tok, which everybody thinks so it's just kids doing dancing videos. I

I don't know everybody's on it. Now that Well, again, I hate generalizing, a lot of people are on it. And when I learned about that, what's kind of interesting is, if you're not on Tik Tok, you're probably seeing tick tock videos. So my mother who is, I won't tell you her age, she's not on tick tock, but she is on Instagram. And she tells me all the time, I'm not on Tik Tok that for kids, and then she sends me Instagram reels that I saw on Tik Tok two weeks ago. And I'm like you, you're effectively onto it. So anyhow.

The next bullet point was customer interaction. Like I said, traditional advertising is one way communication, you have the ability to interact with your clients in a binary way. So

somebody says, Hey, I had a really nice meal, with Southern social on Facebook, Southern social has the capability to go in and say, Hey, thank you. Come back, we'd love to have you there is a $5, off coupon for your for your lunch. That's very difficult to do with traditional advertising.

So customer interaction is huge. It also allows you and I think this is the biggest, probably for businesses, this is got to be the biggest benefit is it allows you to tackle PR issues right away. So somebody says, Oh, man, I went to Southern social, and boy, that meal just wasn't really good. You have the opportunity to go in and say, I'm really sorry about that. Would you like to give us more details? Would you like to divulge what happened, and then you can get into that conversation with them and hopefully rectify that, as opposed to, I go to a party and I tell my friends up? Well, I went to Southern social and the meal was trash. That's it. I mean, that's where the conversation ends. And all my friends all know that. I didn't have a good experience. So if you are a business owner, you can tackle PR issues using social media.

Another bullet point here is the multiple types of content that you can use on social media. So if I want to produce a radio ad, Fred, you probably plays tons of radio ads, what are your limitations?

Okay, can I run a video on radio? Can I run a video on radio? Can I run a audio only radio ads, two and a half minutes without breaking the bank? Probably not, right? So on social media, and again, I'm not picking on your radio, I'm just giving the benefits and the advantages of social media. If you want to run a two and a half hour long video explaining your business, you can do that. There's no limitation. You know, if you're running an advertisement on television, you're limited pretty much 30 seconds. If you're putting an ad in the newspaper, you're usually limited to a size and there's no movement, there's no audio, there's no video, there's nothing like that. So social media gives you that ability to really put what you want out there, into the to the universe. So blogs, photos, videos, and shared articles, that's another great thing about it is you can and I don't want to say steal, because that's not necessarily true. But you can take great information in your field and share it with your followers showing that you know this stuff. You know, for instance, we do this all the time, if we see a great article about

YouTube advertising, we may share it through our social media channels. And the people that are seeing it know that we've read it and know that we're now knowledgeable on that particular subject. So it's a really easy way to get, again, your potential customer or your follower, to know that you know what you're talking about. The last thing I want to talk about, and I'll probably talk more about this than anything because it really is our expertise is the advertising capabilities. So and that's kind of what I that's how I got started in social media to begin with was the fact that it was cheap. That was the first thing that you know, that was the first flag that went up. I'm like, wow, this is really cheap. What else can I do with this? So when we would run political ads, they'll probably tell you that, you know, we had a very conservative issue, I can target only conservative voters, we have a very liberal issue, I can target only liberal people. And I could make sure that they were the only ones that were seeing these particular ads. Very difficult to do with traditional advertising but it is a great business growth tool to be able to say again, Southern social, let's say they have a shrimp and grits special on Friday night. I can take a great video of them back there making shrimp and grits and I can put it on the Facebook and Instagram and YouTube pages and say hey, come out and check out our shrimp and grits and I can pay Facebook to only hit people that are interested in seafood and southern food. So I'm not hitting people that are you know, vegetarians that may not want to eat the shrimp I'm not hitting people that maybe don't like grits I'm only hitting the people I'm only paying for that ad to hit people that like those particular things. And I keep something social get a lot of free advertising for this, I guess but but I like it here. I've been here a few times. So I think that but um, so when you're advertising through these social media channels, there are these vague demographics, behaviors and interests that you can use, but you can dial even deeper. You can put code on your website, so that anytime somebody visits Fred's website, we can create an ad so that you're going to get Fred's stuff. I guarantee you 90% of people in this room have been on Amazon, at some point, looked at a pair of shoes, looked at it, you know, I don't know the theory or something. And then they get back on social media, what do you see? You see an ad of that in your feet? Do not listen. I mean, well, they could be listening. I'm not saying I'm not listening. But it's predictive advertising. And we know that you were on that site. So because we embedded code there, and we retargeted you. While it's very frustrating, and I don't like it as a consumer, it is an incredible business growth tool. So again, we like to use it to our advantage and we like to use it to our clients advantage.

The other scary thing about this is let's say we create a video, right? Again, well, you're tripping drinks Video Example. there and they're they're making it and sale. It's it's a 32nd video. If somebody watches that video, I can retarget them with something else. So again, we'll use a shrimp and grits. Hey, come on, come on Friday night, check out a show from goods $5 off, so on and so forth. And let's say they don't come they watch the video, but they don't come. We can retarget them. Hey, sorry, you missed our shrimp and grits special. Monday night we're having 14 Or one come on out. We know that they know who we are. And they saw the video. So again, a lot of the ads that you guys are seeing on social media. They're not happenstance, they're incredibly targeted. One thing that I do want to tell you and this is I told Maureen like I'm not pitching my business, I don't litigate cases, I don't elaborate on knees, I don't have we don't have any specialized super degree on this. All of you guys are capable of learning how to do this. And it's really I mean, I hate to say this, this, like the reverse sales pitch, it's not that hard. Just gotta take a little time research and figure it out. But I'm really it's the creativity that gets me that makes me enjoy it. Because there are 10,000 ways to make natural payments. You know, there's so many different ways to advertise particular businesses. And once you figure out the way that works for you, it's like printing money. It's great. I don't know how much time that's taken. Steve, I don't know if we're close, or we have a few more minutes. I'm open for questions. I don't know if I had anything else. Business suggestions. Okay. So what I will say before we get to questions is you cannot possibly post to your social media platforms too often, it's impossible. If you can post every minute of every day, do it. Obviously, that's ridiculous, you can't do that. So when I would tell you is for the amount of time that you have, find the platforms where your potential customers are, and utilize those and try to post to them as again, as often as you can. If it's once a week, hey, it's once a week. Make that goal twice a week. If it's every day, great. Make that goal twice a day, try to do it as often as possible. And do not get paralysis by analysis. We see this all the time. What I mean by that is you analyze I don't know if the fonts right. I don't know if I like this message. I don't know if you know the call it forget it. If it's grammar is correct, posted. I'm not a big fan of posting things where there's misspellings and things like that. Yeah, maybe you want to analyze that, but do not get paralyzed. Okay, no paralysis by analysis. engage with your audience. We see all the time people post stuff and then go away and people comment. Hey, this is really cool. Reply. Thanks. It's as simple as that. But we see businesses all the time. They post their reply their comments, and there are no replies, you have an opportunity to talk. It would be like if somebody walked in your door, and they say good morning, and you turned around, wouldn't turn around and say good morning. Good to see you. Thanks for coming in. And we Oh. The last thing and this is the most important thing, in my opinion, be authentic. Be authentic. Don't fake it. Don't, don't try to. So then some people do it again. Let's say they create this video and it's it makes this place look like 10,000 square feet. They've got 400 waiters and they've got food that they don't really have on the menu and then you show up and you're like, Man, this is not what I thought it was gonna be. You're gonna lose that customer. Be authentic. Lean on the things that make your business good. You're in business I hope because you trust in what you do. So tell the people about what you do and why it's great. And again, don't fake don't let because it will get found out quick. Um, I have contact information here but I've got

one right before for Facebook. I know we always see reach and engagement. Can you explain the difference between that and then the other thing is is that are there general demographics age and gender for Facebook force versus and stuff versus Tik Tok?

So I'll answer the first question. Reach is literally how many people you've reached. I mean, that sounds overly simplistic, but um, so when we now we're going to complicate it. I got oversimplified here but we're going to complicate it So when we create, when we when, when Facebook or Instagram or any of these social media platforms tell you give you certain metrics, one of them is reach. And again, literally how many people? How many individual people have you gotten your ad in front of, or your post or whatever it happens to be? We're in the advertising game. So I would say that I'm impressed impressions is a little bit different. So you will always have as as many or more impressions to reach. So let's say we run an ad for southern social and we reach 10,000 people and there's 30,000 impressions. Impressions is literally how many times the ad showed up. Okay. So there's 10,000 people. So as a whole saw it 30,000 times, engagement is anytime somebody makes a voluntary action on your post. So they they click the photo to make it bigger. They click like, they click comment, and they comment, they click Share. They make an action on your post or your ad. The demographics, very generalized, old people, Facebook, middle aged people, Instagram, young people tick tock. I get more in the details on that. middle aged women, a lot of times if we're trying to advertise for a business of you know, soccer moms, we're doing Instagram baby boomers, we're looking for Facebook, high school kids, we're looking Tik Tok. It's super generalized, but that's kind of where it stands. That changes that evolves. I mean, 10 years ago, you didn't even have middle aged people on Facebook. It was a kid, actually, Facebook started, you had to have a college email in order to sign up for Facebook. Junior year of junior year of college, what school do you go to? Or the state? Okay, so you had an fsu.edu email. If you had a Gmail account, you could not sign up for Facebook. So it tells you how it's evolved over the years. Then, seven years ago, I would say you didn't say you didn't see middle aged people or old people on Instagram, it was all kids, anywhere the old people really kids try to get away. Eventually and again, this was kind of the crux of the beginning of the conversation is you're not on Tik Tok. Today, my guess is you will be. And people laugh when we say social media, Vero Beach, social media, social media, I've considered changing the name of Vero Beach, the current state of the internet. That's what we're in. Social media is the current state of the internet. It's not what you go to to see what your grandkids are having for breakfast anymore. I mean, that was what it was 20 years ago. But all of these platforms realized this can be used as a business growth tool. Any other questions? Steve's got a question.

Steve Schwartz 17:37
So how would you recommend people use their smartphone and selfie videos for no cost? To get their message out to as many people as possible

Curtis Carpenter 17:50
July 28 2020, to Instagram reels as the number one way to get your message out for free to people that don't know who you are. On July 29 2022, that may change I mean today right now the second that's what it is the difference between a real on a video okay, so a video is just the video can take a video and we can post it on Facebook and it goes into the news feed or we can post it on Instagram, it goes into news feed or we can post it on YouTube and it goes to your channel. A real is a specific section of well the term real is a specific section of Facebook and Instagram. Typically, you want to record those in a portrait mode up and down that sideways videos usually want to record sideways 16 by nine versus nine by 16. I mean we get real technical here but yeah, reels would go in the reels section of those platforms and YouTube calls them shorts. Okay. YouTube shorts is great too, by the way for organic exposure. Yeah, shoot a selfie. Well I'm gonna do right here everybody this is Curtis carpenter with Vero Beach social media. We're here at Southern social at the Vero Beach Christian business association lunch there Steve Schwartz back there and I'm giving an example of how Instagram reels will get organic engagement. Hope you guys stay tuned. Okay, so I did that video. Did you get our logo when I did it? I didn't have real we're gonna post that to our Instagram we're gonna posted to our YouTube we're gonna post it to our facebook and I will email you guys tomorrow on how many people that reached my guess is gonna be about 1000 people that don't know who I am don't know who we are. Don't know who you are, don't know southern socialists. But they know let's do another one.

Unknown Speaker 19:39
People that are in your opinion, so I'm only on Facebook because because because it's

Curtis Carpenter 19:47
generalizations generalizations, asterisk generalization.

Speaker 4 19:51
It's very hard to so I don't know. Oh, so how I put something on. So I I only know about followers, right? Like I only let very certain people know about me. Okay. Okay, on Facebook.

Unknown Speaker 20:07
I got friends in January. That's it. So how does this reach other people on Instagram reels or whatever? If they're not

Curtis Carpenter 20:16
following me, you bring up an incredibly important part of this that I left out. This is specific for business accounts. So I'm sorry, what business do you own? Or do you apologize? krishnappa. Okay, so you and your personal account, you can do it. If you have privacy settings set so that other people can see you. Yes. You're not going to reach other people. If you post that from the Krishna FM, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, so on and so forth. That's what people will see. Okay, because or if I had a business, because it's a business account, right?

Speaker 4 20:52
I didn't think normal people are regular people can open a business account.

Curtis Carpenter 20:57
Anybody. So to get into this, on Facebook, anyway, every business page that Moreno's we've gone back and forth with this about me getting admin access. So she feels my pain here. Every business account, okay, Christian FM, has what they call admins, for administrators. So the first time we talked to a client, we're going to advertise for them when they say, Oh, you need my username and password? No, I don't, I need you to go into that page, and make me my personal account and administrator on your business account. So what I'm getting at is, you as a person has a Facebook page, you can create a business account and be an admin on any business account you want, that you create.

Unknown Speaker 21:40
And it's because I have a Facebook account.

Curtis Carpenter 21:44
Instagram is a little different, YouTube's a little bit different. But for all intents and purposes, that's how it works.

Unknown Speaker 21:51
Yes. What are some of the basic Best Practices right now virtual? So like, videos should be less than 32nd? Picture? You know, yeah, no more than

Curtis Carpenter 22:00
those change? I mean, that changes like on the regular Yeah, so what I tell people about video length is make it as long as you need to make it. Okay, so what I mean by that is you're not in college writing an essay, where you have a 500 word cow that you have to hit, if you can hit it in 50 words, 50 words, you can do it in 42 and 40. As long as the information is good, and the videos engaging, I mean, people listen to Joe Rogan for five hours. You know, I mean, the most listened to most watched guy in the world and find our episodes, I just did a 10 second video that 1000 People are gonna watch. That didn't really give him a lot of information. But you know what I'm saying? If you can make an engaging, and you can make it educational, maybe funny or something you want? Yes. Oh, that answered your question. I'm sorry.

Unknown Speaker 22:54
Yes, we, you know, you see on Facebook boosts, which means that they want money. Funny, I mean, so can you still reach people without doing

Curtis Carpenter 23:05
the money more so with Facebook ads, for this particular instance, Facebook, realize they have an incredibly valuable advertising platform. So 1012 years ago, when Business Council first started, you got tons of organic reach for free you just posted and all these people see it. Now, well, this is probably six months old data. But on Facebook, if you had a business account, you were hitting about eight to 10% of the of your followers. So southern social has 1000 followers on Facebook, they post something about tripping grids, they're gonna hit about 80 to 100 people organically for free, you're gonna hit those other 920 people better pails up. So the Boost Post option, I want to touch on that for a second. That is an incredibly elementary way to advertise, they give you very limited options. You're not really capturing data, it's difficult to retarget. If you've got 10 bucks in your pocket, you want to hit a few extra people, click Boost Post, do it. If you really, really, really want to advertise, you want to look up Facebook Ads Manager and get incredibly proficient with it, or call an advertising agency.

Unknown Speaker 24:07
See words that you can use in your advertisement that will boost other people to see it

Curtis Carpenter 24:12
or not really on Facebook. Okay, so when you talk about keywords, Steve will tell you the first thing that pops in my mind is Google. I'm thinking SEO and blogging. And that's where those keywords are important. So I'll shift gears a little bit on your website. Your goal should be to get your website to the top of Google when people search for your business. So if I'm searching for childcare resources or parental resources, I want The Buggy Bunch to be at the top. If I were to The Buggy Bunch. The best way to do that is to update your website frequently using the keywords that you want people to find you under. Because what Google does is they they crawl websites, they literally call it the Google crawler and they see what keywords are on what websites and they're gonna put you to the top again if you're updating your website for Believe using those keywords. So for Steve, he wants to use digital marketing. He wants to use website building he wants to rattle them off. That's, and if you search those, he has a really good search engine optimization plan. I mean, he does right. He goes up there, search social media and Vero Beach. We're gonna be up there. I mean, that's what we do. So the keywords you're asking, yeah, so whatever field you're in, use those keywords on your website. As far as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, we maybe maybe there's hashtags that you want to use, you know, I mean, that that's where hashtag strategy comes in. The keywords not so much on social media, that's more of like a website thing. What about censorship?

Speaker 4 25:43
It's been censored.

Curtis Carpenter 25:45
This is 90% of my job, is we run an ad, that seems fine. And Facebook says, Nope, can't do that. It's against our policy. Shoot. Which, right, which follows. And in, they make matters worse, they don't have actual people sitting there looking at every and I mean, it's computer generated AI, and they they flag a word they use. I have a friend of mine, this photographer, she uses the word shoot. Oh, five flags. So in our we're, we're pretty live a Facebook rep. I mean, we're pretty lucky I get on the horn, or I can send an email and usually get that rectified somewhat quickly. Um, but for the average Joe, oh, yeah, you're kind of you're you're under the thumb of, of Facebook's policies. So what I would recommend, if you're a business owner, and this is a very strong recommendation, if you take anything out of this talk, this is it. If you are running ads for your business, on your personal account, don't touch politics. Don't touch it. But if you say something about Biden, if you say something about Trump, if you say something about whoever, I mean, listen, they have very strict and very dynamic policies that will shut you down in a hurry. And if you're in what they call Facebook, jail, you're not able to run ads. You're stuck. So just stay away from it. Text Your buddies. Hey, Joe Biden sucks in a little. Donald Trump sucks, whatever, I don't care. But don't put it on Facebook. Don't put it on Twitter, don't just, again, stay away from it. If you own a business, and you're advertising now, just some Joe Schmo walk down the street. I'm an auto mechanic at Firestone. I don't care. Whatever I want. Put on Facebook, fine, you're fine. But if you want to protect your business, just stay away from it. Some of you guys are Facebook friends with me. You know what I post videos of my one year old daughter in Dodger baseball, that's it. And trust me, I have strong opinions about a lot of things. But I just don't talk about it on social media. There's another question. I'm sorry. But there's two of these. Two questions. Number one, what do you do? Number two, how do you sort through all these different places? I mean, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, tick tock? Yeah, well, I don't sleep. And we've got a staff of five people in my office that help with this, that make sure that this runs smoothly, what we do so I'll go back a little bit to my introduction, really what we do, we started with the pinnacle of our business was, we are going to be experts in social media advertising. That's it. And at the time, it was Facebook and Instagram. And that's really it, then it was okay, um, you're really good at running ads, what do you look like? So we created a video production company, where you have professional photographers, then it was okay, well, these ads look really good. And we're getting to people and clicking through to our website. But our website stinks. We started building websites. We do a lot, we do a lot of digital. And again, I don't want to advertise. This is not why I'm here. I'm here to inform you guys. But that's what we do. I mean, we were a digital marketing agency. So you put the same thing on all these different places. Usually, well, I mean, we try to make a platform dependent. Again, on tick tock, everything should be portrait mode on Facebook, a lot of times you wanted landscape on Instagram, where so yeah, I mean, that's what we do. We're minions and offices, clicking on keyboards, making sure that it looks right. There was a question behind you. I'm

Unknown Speaker 29:23
sorry. That's specifically to realize, yep, we all spend a lot of time and so we'll assume we're on the rails and we'll put one is here is kept for that again, you know, in the last 10 to 15 seconds. 90%. Right. All right. How long does one have to be on that specific reel before it's ready for somebody to watch? Because also watch my kids it'll look down and they'll just split by five we'll go

Curtis Carpenter 29:51
to row the old rule of thumb was three seconds and my guess and I don't know this for a fact my guess is that's dropped probably two and a half, two seconds, which Once you've once you've shown engagement I'm sorry, it's the I know this last question. I'm going to go on a brand short run. Facebook when Facebook first started it was all relational. Who did you know? And then that's what you were seeing so you know him so you're seeing his posts and you know, friends are seeing this post. You know, you know Marines use the Marines post with tick tock did was it played with the algorithm. It wasn't contact based. It was interest based. Okay, and tic tac was the first one to do this. I don't know who you know, I know what you like. You like baseball, we're put baseball stuff in front of you. You know, you like shrimp and grits. I'm gonna give us an outline. We're going to put that in front of you, quarterbacks. I like Corvettes. I'm going to put Corvettes. I don't know any of these people. I just know these video. I like these videos. So Facebook did what they do best and they stole the idea. So now Facebook and Instagram through reels are now interest based. So when you're looking at rails, it's all about interest. So like you said, if you're seeing something with cats, and you watch it for three seconds, guess what, man? You're gonna watch cat videos.

Unknown Speaker 31:00
Sorry, just curious on how long

Curtis Carpenter 31:04
the old rule of thumb was three seconds. And like I said, I don't know for a fact but my guess and Listen, this isn't like I can open up a book and look at it. This stuff changes every day. My guess would be it's one and a half, two seconds. All right. I was told I believe. Awesome. Thank you all very much.